The OpenIndiana project has been officially announced. OpenIndiana is part of the Illumos foundation and a community distribution which aims to to continue OpenSolaris, previously shut down by Oracle. Some details of the announcement were published on c0t0d0s0.org.

The problem is that there does not seem to be a development community large enough to really make up for the lack of code contribution from Solaris parent company (SUN then, Oracle now).

So without that, OpenSolaris's future is iffy at best. I wish them luck, but their main problem is going to be to gain developers and maintain their enthusiasm.

Now that is an orphaned project, I fail to see what an OpenSolaris-like OS has as differentiator, given that most of the exciting technologies like Dtrace and ZFS already made it to FreeBSD for example. Unless the value proposition is that they will incorporate whichever code Oracle opensources from evolving versions of Solaris.

+1 (apparently I'd already moderated you recently)

I used to run OpenSolaris on one of my systems at home but since the uncertainty of the project after Oracle took over, I switched to FreeBSD (technically I switched back to FreeBSD, having been a user prior to OpenSolaris) as the daemon had a stable working build of ZFS.

It would be a pity to see OpenSolaris die as I think theres more justification for it's existence than some of the more generic Linux distros out there. However sadly I too think OpenSolaris will really struggle to attract enough developers just to maintain the OS - let alone build new features that will push OpenSolaris forward.